Making Priorities

08/10/14

There are some things, long-term projects, I am planning to work on that I need to make actually priorities for.

Specifically, the things I want to make priorities for are:

1. Untitled Wuxia Game Project
2. Website improvements (mostly behind-the-scenes sorta stuff)
3. Super Smash Bros. Melee competitive ability improvements
4. Learning to draw
5. Video game history knowledge development

Ordered by how much I really want it (though game-making and website should maybe be switched).

Making a game has been on my mind for a really long time. I started trying to actually make a game in my spare time shortly after graduating, but my inability to do anything productive and my lack of experience made it all pretty difficult. I'm slowly building a skillset of both general productive ability and game-development knowledge that puts making an actual game into the realm of possibility. To the extent that I actually have a webpage setup for that.

This website is becoming the place I organize my thoughts and general plans. It is becoming the tool I use to get things done, and as such I need to practice iterating on it. I need to make the tool better, to become more efficient and to decrease any resistance I have in using the tool. It's also a chance to practice some web programming, which I'm currently not doing at all. This site is static HTML with some bare-bones CSS. That needs to change.

Super Smash Bros. Melee competitive skill improvements is a little silly, but it's a chance to work on various tool creation skills to improve literal skills. It's something to deliberately develop Deliberate Practice routines with.

Learning how to draw is something I've always wanted to do. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has been pretty good so far and seems like a good set of exercises on the way to capable drawing. This is slow going, but I got a setup at home ready for whenever I got a little time to do an exercise or read a chapter.

History is something I need to know more of. Game history is something I can start with, as I clearly got an inherent interest in the subject. There's going to be tedious content to deal with here, and a lot of misrepresentation of the past that I need to sift through, like history in general. Knowing history is really useful for predicting the consequences of future choices. Games are a playful place to build that ability.